Strategic Retreat
Early this year we reshuffled the team in anticipation of a rebound in the market sometime this year. Aaron shifted his focus to business development, including driving VC funding efforts and Callan stepped up to lead the engineering development team.
Despite the enthusiasm, passion and dedication from all in the team, the results on the battlefield have been less than stellar.
The VC landscape has not improved in any significant degree. A consistent theme is that VCs have shifted away from metaverse and crypto gaming and those still in the space are looking for pre-token plays and “safer” bets.
The skeletal development team struggled to deliver the game and maintain a strong cadence of updates. The early access beta was released a few months behind schedule and there were no updates since.
While there was a flurry of initial activity and enthusiastic uptake of the game in early April, activity soon died down and the current internal metrics of user engagement are dismal. Despite a few bug reports, feedback from the community has been minimal. Even my kids who were some of the biggest proponents of the game in Season One (even they were able to navigate the landscape of MetaMask transactions) quickly lost interest after a few weeks.
At the start of June we made the difficult decision to cease development of the game in it’s current form. The financial burden of supporting the development of the game from our own pockets while never receiving one cent in salary or selling any tokens for personal gain has been and remains unsustainable for us.
Whatever path we were on wasn’t working, and instead of going all-in and burning the remaining (dwindling) capital on a futile “wen marketing” play — we’ve decided that in order to move forward, we need to take stock of where we are and go back to the drawing board. A strategic retreat for now, not a surrender.
